REPRISE reporting guidelines

Katherine Cowan, Senior Adviser to the JLA, talks about PSPs and the REPRISE reporting guidelines

Priority setting is not always well reported

In a world of complicated health conditions and limited resources, the prioritisation of topics for health research is vital. Prioritisation exercises help ensure that funding is directed towards the most important unmet needs. But how do we know if a prioritisation exercise is legitimate and that the resulting priorities are credible? We can only make that judgement if things are reported transparently and comprehensively – and unfortunately for the world of research priority setting, historically this hasn’t always happened.

This was a problem that Dr Allison Tong, from the University of Sydney School of Public Health, wanted to get to grips with, to improve the quality of reporting of health research priority setting, and to help grow the evidence base for the methods.